Not long after Windows 10’s first semi-annual major update of the year, AMD today has released Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Edition 18.Q2 WHQL, bringing full support for the April 2018 Update. A more mundane quarterly enterprise release, 18.Q2 includes the usual bug fixes, performance optimizations for professional applications, and updates for VDI & graphics virtualization. Additionally, 18.Q2 is rolling out alongside updates to ProRender and its plugins.

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Overall, AMD has added a number of new developer rendering features to ProRender, including lighting and scenery effects. And introduced last month, macOS versions of ProRender Blender and Autodesk Maya plugins include support for macOS High Sierra 10.13.3 and higher using Metal 2; eGPU devices require 10.13.4. In other words, GPU acceleration can take more advantage of Apple’s own low-level API, Metal 2.

More so than the usual amount, AMD also stressed their enterprise driver testing process and some of the results gained from it, citing 2017 data. Given that AMD only started rolling out their new enterprise drivers in October 2016, the company is now able to look at a full year’s worth of feedback and issue reports.

Meanwhile, for performance improvements, AMD is citing year-over-year uplifts in professional application performance compared to 17.Q2, with around 12% to 47% increases as tested using SPECapc and SPECviewperf. For Dassault Systèmes CATIA specifically, AMD saw 38% to 100% speedups in model benchmarks.

In a more general sense, these uplifts can compound over time and lend older products like the AMD FirePro W7100 a new lease on life. AMD is presenting this data like so: updating a FirePro-era driver to a Radeon Pro Enterprise era driver on the Tonga-based W7100 (Radeon R9 285) increases performance to the same degree that upgrading to the Polaris-based Radeon Pro WX7100 (RX 480) will, and also to the same degree if you had upgraded the Pitcairn-based W7000 (Radeon HD 7870 GHz Ed.) to the W7100.

Moving on to AMD’s MxGPU, their hardware-based SR-IOV virtualized graphics solution, 18.Q2 is coupled with the February production-level host driver for Citrix XenServer MxGPU, while XenDesktop and XenApp guest drivers have been updated with 18.Q2 binaries for cloud-deployed 64-bit Windows 10 and 7 platforms. The packages and compatibility notes can be found on AMD’s Citrix Pro Driver page. Similarly, VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5 guest drivers for MxGPU and passthrough have been updated with 18.Q2 binaries for cloud-deployed 64-bit Windows 10 and 7 platforms.

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